Hi Timeworkers!

We hope you’re enjoying the latest step in our development process, version 0.1.3. This was a large milestone for us, the moment when we all stepped back and started to see whispers of a completed game. It's a surreal but awesome feeling. 

0.1.3 had us focus on smartly designed tutorials and a well-thought-out difficulty curve. With our last build, we started the game off with the stage “Ingot Intro.” Internally, we all love that stage. It was the first level in the original game jam demo and it was the first we implemented when switching to our new optimized build. But after a few rounds of playtesting, we found that confused stares and polite refusals to keep playing meant that introducing our mechanics needed more gradation. Thus, the new tutorial levels. 

The five new tutorial levels give the players plenty of time to play with the many mechanics of the game. Time itself doesn’t become a mechanic until “Pipe Panic”, and isn’t strict until “Breakout.” The levels are short and simple, and very focused on their teaching. But when level design isn’t enough, we have our favorite overworked slime girl to help.

Audrey is your guide throughout the factory floor and provides a lot of help with the tutorial. With her inclusion, we spent a lot of time creating a flexible and dynamic dialogue system to make teaching the player easier. Now, any event or happening can trigger dialogue from Audrey; be it a helpful nudge or a snarky little remark. Implementing supplementary systems like these isn’t the sexiest thing in the world, but we’re finding it a huge boon for designing now and going forward.

You know what is sexy? Amazing art. Our artists have been hard at work making 0.1.3 shine like the Timeworks CEO’s bald head. We’ve been calling the process set dressing; taking our greyboxed levels and making them look lived in and dense with detail. The Timeworks HR department may not care about work conditions, but we do.

With so much pretty art to implement we focused on making the levels that use them as fun as possible. Our legacy levels like “Hop, Skip, and Jump” and “Big Gap” had a few things changed to maximize the fun factor but remain as fun as before. We designed “Quicksand” and felt like there was more potential in its design, so we made one change and created “Sandquick.” I’ll let you play the demo and find out what that change is. And “Big Gap” is... tricky. If you can beat that, you’ll be ready for whatever we come up with next. Though these levels are harder, they still introduce mechanics and prioritize teaching rather than difficulty. We’re itching to design some mind-breaking puzzles for you to enjoy in the final release. 

And that's about all I can share right now; if I let anything from the Lab get out then Colin Page would lightly reprimand me. (It's scary when he does it.)  I’ll let our demo do the rest of the talking, able to be played right now on our Itch.io page! 

Until next